Posted: December 31st, 2007
For me, the game of year is without doubt:
Halo 3 (IGN Review)- the only truly epic game, complete with the best soundtrack I’ve heard so far in a video game.
Note that I wasn’t a Halo series fan. I thought Halo 1 was a mediocre game, Halo 2 was just “good”, mostly because of the energy sword being so much fun. But after playing Halo 3, I’m now a fan of the series. I even bought Halo 1 for Xbox (I had originally played it on the PC), would’ve bought Halo 2 too if it wasn’t way too expensive for an Xbox game even though a friend of mine has it and I could borrow it anytime, and will probably read at least Halo: The Fall of Reach [wikipedia].
Last time I played (sadly, more than a week ago) I got the Hayabusa armor. I’m definitively going for the Katana that requires 1000 GS (unlocking all achievements). Already setting a team to play through the campaign in legendary with me. Legendary is too hard for a casual gamer like me to play in single player.
Runner Up: there’s just nothing that comes even close to Halo 3! Sorry Bioshock.
Posted: December 30th, 2007
In case you haven’t heard, Google Reader went Social.
Summary: Add people to your gmail chat/gtalk and you’ll be able to see their Reader’s shared items and they’ll be able to see yours. It’s a great way to not miss interesting blog posts (specially “niche posts” that don’t hit the digg frontpage) and to make sure you get the “news that matters” to you.
My contact, if you want to add me to is: luis.rei@gmail.com
My friends list is currently populated by a few fellow Prt.Sc bloggers and Robert Scoble and it’s already great! I hope I can get a few more people in.
This feature was added in a controversial manner: without informing the users that items they had shared with select people were about to be shared with all their contacts. If this happens to be a problem for you, google has posted some “fixes“.
Posted: December 11th, 2007
A List of Open Source Games (wikipedia)
Many of these games are lightweight multiplayer and multi-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows)
Personal Picks:
Assault Cube
Armagetron
BZflag
FreeCiv
Must try:
OpenArena
Nexuiz
Posted: November 19th, 2007
The Talks/Workshops
* Amazon WebServices Architecture by Mike Culver – I learned more about S3 and I knew nothing about EC2 which is actually very interesting.
* IronPython and Dynamic Languages on .NET by Mahesh Prakriya – I missed it but a lot of people said it was brilliant.
* Building platforms by Fred Oliveira – I got to learn more about microformats, APIs and web scraping.
* Creating a game in 60 minutes (Criar jogo em 60 minutos) by Paulo Laureano – this one was inspirational 
the concept was mixing sample code using to create a game quickly. While actually creating a game took me between 6 and 8h that can be attributed to the lack of sample code to do certain things I wanted to do.
The Contest
For the first 6-8h or so I worked with Celso Pinto and Armando Alves on an idea by Samuel Martins – Sapo Boa Vida. Andreia Gaita helped me a bit with some peculiarities of DOM. My code fetched the information from Sapo GIS.
Later my code was converted to PHP by Celso and I went on to work on my game project (the one inspired by Paulo Laureano’s workshop) while Samuel started with the PHP and Celso went home. I only interrupted my work on my game project, Kill All Squares, to help Samuel with PHP’s DOM – Celso’s conversion of my code was a bit too literal and as Joao from the Sapo Team found out, PHP’s DOM is a bit more peculiar (strict) requiring the NS to be specified.
Sapo Boa Vida eventually won one of the prizes (the prize for the best Mashup).
People
I met a lot of people – many from prt.sc and from the Sapo Team but also others. Some caused a very good impression. I got a lot of good tips, advice and even help in the contest (from the people I already mentioned).
I probably would’ve had more time for the contest and would’ve been able to work on a 3rd project (there were other ideas) but one of the big points in going to this kind of events is talking to other people.
Posted: November 13th, 2007
Sapo Codebits (blog, wiki) starts tomorrow. I wonder how many people will show up and how many teams will enter in the contest… doesn’t really matter as long as I win 
nah seriously, the more the better of course. There are quite a few people going from prt.sc so I won’t be alone
I’m not going to be doing any live blogging (or at least I don’t plan to) but I do plan to keep my twitter updated – “going to talk X”, “talk Y was cool”, “doing this/that” style updates and at the end of the day, if I’m not too tired I’ll provide a summary. Chances are lots of other bloggers will be blogging live/end of day summaries so if you’re not going because you can’t, at least you’ll get a pretty good idea of what you missed.
I’ll also try to take some photos and keep my flickr updated too.
Security
Just went over the small checklist I blogged about previously. Told the firewall to block all incoming connections and started using OpenDNS again -I first used it in Norway as a way to fix Fon‘s DNS problems at the time (screwy youtube).
As for the VPN, I really haven’t tested my own VPN – I’m counting on FEUP’s VPN to work, which admittedly is far from a sure thing. Not that I expect anything below WPA2-Enterprise (TLS) from the APs available.
My emails/IMs sometimes have one of my ultra secret recipes for CAKE so I’m usually careful with them.
Need to not forget to backup everything on my macbook later tonight (via Time Machine).
Camera
I’m still wondering if I should take my camera’s cables with me. 144 pictures (the capacity of my 512MB Memory Sick – need to buy a new one) should be more than enough for just 3 days. So I guess that’s a no.
Ipod/Portable HD
Borrowing my mother’s Ipod again after taking it to Norway I became a huge fan. I was going to download stuff earlier today but Miro crashed (possibly leopard related). I updated and it’s working now so I’m currently downloading a few talks from Google Tech Talks, TED talks and Channel 9.
I loaded a bunch of movies and episodes into my portable HD but I don’t think I’ll have the dead time to watch any of them except maybe on the trips (via Alfa Pendular Porto->Lisbon in approximately 2h30-3h) but that’s when I plan to watch the talks. Then again I’ll probably sleep on the train tomorrow.
Posted: October 30th, 2007
There is no easy way to create application shortcuts (a shortcut to an application that may or may not have arguments). It’s extremely easy to do in Windows and Ubuntu (<your-favorite-nix/linux-distro>) but not in OSX.
I’m sure that as usual, some idiot apple zealot (sorry for the pleonasm) is going to try (yeah try, comments moderated but they still try) to post a comment saying how that’s a good (great) thing, Steve Jobs is a genius and I’m dumb for not knowing that it’s such a good thing or even knowing what a shortcut is (like when I posted about the iPhone lacking a SDK and guess what? It will get one – in your face zealot 
).
Posted: October 16th, 2007
I’m giving twitter another try. Aside from the social aspect, it could be interesting as a way for me to keep track of what I do, and when.
My twitter feed gets displayed in the sidebar on my webpage too.
I’m using twitterrific to both follow twitters and post to twitter.
Posted: October 15th, 2007
Let’s skip the part about the why – that’s for another post, maybe. I want to create an application that has browser windows inside it. I’m hardly the only person to want to do this but there seem to be surprisingly few ways to do this if you consider cross-platform support a must.
Java can’t do it. In fact after searching I was only able to find 2 options:
Option a) wxMozilla – I already knew this one but considering the last version of it (0.5.4) came out in 2005 and there are at least few posts/emails around the web seem to indicate some problems – though I haven’t investigated this thoroughly.
The big plus of wxmozilla is that I believe this is what was used to develop gush and what I want to do (want != will) is very similar to gush in terms of GUI.
Option b) GtkEmbedMoz/Gecko# – this is the solution that I’m leaning towards.
Does anyone out there know any other options? Preferably something usable with either Java or Python (I really don’t feel like coding in C++) and Linux/Mac/Win support would be nice though only Linux/Mac support is strictly required.
UPDATE: having looked at things in more detail I don’t think GtkEmbedMoz/Gecko# is a good solution for me based on the OSX support and the fact that I’d rather use python for this. That leaves me with wxMozilla as the only option for now (and I’m not sure that it will work).
UPDATE2: while what is (was?) the main page for wxMozilla doesn’t show it, there is an April 2006 version of wxMozilla on the sourceforge page.
Posted: September 16th, 2007
The Register has this article entitled “A Defcon survival guide” which contains a list of measures you should consider taking when using public Wi-Fi.
EDIT: Yes I know this is more than a month and a half old – it has been one of my open tabs in firefox (which works as a sort of to read/to blog list) for that long.
Posted: August 28th, 2007
In a previous post I explained a way to convert a cue/FLAC to mp3. Recently I had to convert a cue/APE to mp3. While searching for ways to do it I came across this post in the aidanhm’s stuff blog. While it has very few posts (the last one in mid February) it does have a few posts that explain how to convert between different file formats (APE, FLAC, WAV,…) and how to deal with cuesheets in Ubuntu.
Since it’s explained there, there’s no point in me repeating it here.
While I haven’t done any of this in Mac OS X, I did download xACT
xACT stands for X Audio Compression Toolkit. It is a GUI based front end (written in AppleScript Studio) for the unix applications Shorten (3.5.1), shntool (2.0.3), monkey’s audio compressor (3.99),flac (1.1.3) and cdda2wav 2.01a32(with paranoia support).
I also looked at this page which explains how to use xACT to convert .flac files to mp3.
UPDATE: Filipe IMed me about a better option for Mac OS X, Max.
Posted: August 21st, 2007
Filipe IMed me this link. That’s great news – it was one of the most important things missing from Ubuntu (in my opinion).
It is such a pain to configure multiple monitors (4 in my case – xinemara if you’re wondering) at the moment. Until you learn how to do it that is. The Nvidia configuration tool that comes with the drivers was a big help but it is far from perfect – I didn’t use it directly (that wouldn’t work, at least not the way it should) but extracted info from the xorg.conf file created by it.
Posted: August 12th, 2007
I finished Xenophon’s Anabasis, returned to Hellenica and finished it.
Ignoring Anabasis, I read Herodutos Histories, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War and Xenophon’s Hellenica. They tell tales of the rise and fall of empires: the rise and fall of the athenian empire, the spartan hegemony in the hellenic world and the very short-lived theban hegemony (it lasted less than 10 years, from the Battle of Leuctra until the Battle of Mantinea – which is the last event narrated in Hellenica). How in one moment a state can control others both close and far away and in the next be fighting in it’s own capital for survival – or vice-versa. Fascinating stuff.
Currently, I feel like taking a break from history and reading something else, perhaps drama. I’m inclined towards Shakespeare’s MacBeth. That said, I fully intend to return to history after the interval though I’m not sure if I’ll continue reading ancient greek history or if I’ll go back to roman history or maybe an even bigger chronological jump to 19th or 20th century history.
I’ll leave you with the last paragraph of Hellenica – relating to the Battle of Mantinea (my emphasis):
The effective result of these achievements was the very opposite of that which the world at large anticipated. Here, where well-nigh the whole of Hellas was met together in one field, and the combatants stood rank against rank confronted, there was no one doubted that, in the event of battle, the conquerors would this day rule; and that those who lost would be their subjects. But God so ordered it that both belligerents alike set up trophies as claiming victory, and neither interfered with the other in the act. Both parties alike gave back their enemy’s dead under a truce, and in right of victory; both alike, in symbol of defeat, under a truce took back their dead. And though both claimed to have won the day, neither could show that he had thereby gained any accession of territory, or state, or empire, or was better situated than before the battle. Uncertainty and confusion, indeed, had gained ground, being tenfold greater throughout the length and breadth of Hellas after the battle than before.
Posted: June 11th, 2007
Forced change can sometimes be good. I think that’s the case with this blog.
I’ve finally rid myself of the hassle of WP administration – the all to frequent updates due to security issues. Funny, that’s the same reason why I changed chefax.fe.up.pt from Linux to OpenBSD.
I used WordPress’s very well done Export feature to migrate from my WP installation to wordpress.com and got around to acquiring the luisrei.com (which I’ve been meaning to do for a while now).
Also I’ll use this to build an actual website instead of just a blog, which is also overdue.
I’m actually more happy than mad about this whole thing. I’m very optimistic about the near future
I know I haven’t blogged for a while, the reasons are twofold: I’ve been extremely busy and I have no net at home (yes, again). This last part will bring about more change